Shag Point and Other Stories: Tales of fishing, diving, boating and life

By Ross Doughty

A perfect gift or escape for lovers of the ocean, fishing and the characters it attracts

In this entertaining collection of short stories, Ross Doughty draws us magically into the underwater world of diving and fishing and its odd cast of characters.

In The Diver, it's the last dive of the last day, the last chance. Donnie has always been a crafty guy, but why did he just give his diving buddy a high-five? In Shag Point, the owner of a resort that has been on the market for months is getting frustrated. What's behind the mysterious offer to buy Shag Point and what does Lindy know? A strange pact in Underwater Garden has a diver offering up a lobster while a large octopus wraps its tentacles around his wrist. And in Big Man Small Man, life is pretty good for Lofty and Devito, a reward for helping their boss Harvey turn a quick profit on some dodgy boat dealing. But Harvey has a spot of bad luck when one of the big Volvos on his floating gin palace seizes up. He needs cash quick.

Each of the 32 tales is accompanied by one of Sara Ransley's delightful illustrations making this book a perfect gift or escape for lovers of the ocean, fishing and the characters it attracts.

About the Author

Ross Doughty has a long association with diving and fishing. He won his first swimming race at five and now at 80, is still a Masters Champion of New Zealand. He has travelled to more than 40 countries, written five books and more than 100 blokes' stories and holds a Master of Creative Writing degree. He lives near the sea in Auckland, New Zealand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: INVICTUS PRESS
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9780473624132

Book preview

MORAL JUDGMENT

Orca and two scuba divers

The Mount Underwater Club has an annual competition for videos and photography. The contest has different sections: one year, my mate Greg won the Topside Section with a picture of a black shag emerging from Crater Bay with a piper wriggling in its beak. Earlier, he had won the Club Section with a photo of members having a barbecue on Motiti Island. But he had never won the most prestigious prize, the Underwater Section.

His underwater camera was best for broad ‘macro’ shots and not capable of ‘micro’ photos like close-ups of small things like anemones, tiny fish, and other small organisms, and it was those close-up photos that seemed to do best in competitions. He purchased a Go-Pro camera-video recorder, and he could select from the menu of different shots and quickly brought his skills up to speed early in the season, well before the AGM at which the competition was judged.

That did not mean he had given up diving for crayfish or spearing fish; his photography was just another activity he had added to his hunting and gathering. One Saturday, we decided to see if the crayfish had returned to the channel in the harbour entrance after the dredging there some years earlier. We tied the bow rope to the buoy and dived down the 30 metres to the ledges there. Although the structure had changed from how we remembered it, we got our limit of legal-sized crayfish and started ascending slowly to the surface. We stopped to decompress on the anchored line of the buoy in the centre of the channel, and Greg began waving his arms at me.

When I turned, I saw the unforgettable sight of a pod of orcas entering the harbour. They were just a few metres from us. As the surging mass of several of these behemoths passed by us, their enormous eyes, as big as tennis balls, rolled backwards in their sockets as they observed the strange sight of multi-coloured humans bubbling air upwards and waving their limbs. Immediately I thought that Greg would be cursing at not having his brand new camera to catch this once in a lifetime shot that could’ve won the club’s underwater photo of the year for him. Perhaps he would even have entered some of the international competitions with great prizes like overseas trips.

As we surfaced, he surprised me because he wasn’t angry at all but enthusiastic, ‘Don’t you see? They were swimming into the harbour, and they’ve got to swim out again. That’s when we will get photos of them.’

‘What do you mean we?’ I asked. ‘I have seen them once; that’ll do me!’

He ignored my objections, ‘If I remember correctly, they come into the harbour one day, feed on a few stingrays, and go on their merry way the next day. But I’m going to check with a few other divers about that tonight.’

It was as if he had not registered my unwillingness because he took our bottles back to get refilled by our mate at the local dive shop and arranged to pick me up again on Sunday morning. My wife couldn’t understand why we wanted to dive back on the same spot the next day. I had told her about seeing the orcas, but not about Greg’s plan, so I just said, ‘Greg wants to try out his new camera in the entrance.’ And that was true enough.

Greg had rung around that night and was still just as excited in the morning, ‘Everyone says they swim out on the outgoing tide the day after they arrive. So our timing is perfect. What we’ll do is wait in the rubber duck until we see them coming and then go over the side. Right?’

‘Right!’ I said, but I was a bit nervous. In the channel, we always dived at the turn of the tide when there was no current. The worst time for us to dive was on the outgoing tide. But we were both strong swimmers, super fit, and could always paddle shoreward if the rip was too strong to get back to the boat.

‘And I brought both cameras,’ he said. ‘If something goes wrong with the new one, you can pass me the old one. That way, I get two chances. If we get separated, shoot some photos yourself. Okay? We should go down the line and hope the pod takes the same path out as when it came in. That way, we won’t drift off in the tide.’

That reassured me a little about our actions. He repeatedly checked both cameras while we sat bobbing in the centre of the entrance channel. He turned the switches on and off incessantly and kept sighting through their viewfinders. His nervousness was palpable. I stood at the controls looking towards the container cranes in a forlorn hope of seeing the orcas surfacing and diving like giant dolphins.

When they appeared about 150 metres from us doing exactly that, I was astounded, but Greg wasn’t surprised. It was just as he had predicted.

‘Right, this is it!’ he said and, picking up the new camera, jumped overboard. I picked up the older camera and followed. We bombed quickly down to about 15 metres, keeping a good hold on the buoy line. Greg held his camera up and ready with his right hand, floating outwards as he slid down the rope held with his left hand. I got behind the hawser, grasping it with both knees and fins, holding the older camera in front of the rope, with one arm around each side of the thick line.

We first saw the orcas about 15 to 20 metres away, and they were quickly closing on us. The front orca had a stingray clamped in its jaws, and it was twisting and turning its head as if it was showing off its catch. A calf was beneath it and a smaller adult on the offside. Greg let go of the rope, filming continuously, drifting with the flow of the tide. There was no way I was going to let go, and I became separated from Greg by about 3 metres; I started clicking on his old camera from behind the hawser.

A fourth orca, larger than any of the others, appeared out of the deeper gloom well below us and swept upwards heading straight for me, but when it saw the hawser, it veered away from me at the last possible instant. Briefly, I let go of the rope and recoiled back in horror as it scooped Greg up in its huge mouth, legs out one side and arms sticking out the other. The orca passed very close, spinning me backwards in the wake of its huge undulating tail.

When they were gone, I found I was still clicking the camera button—out of fear, nervousness, or some other instinct I don’t fully understand. I found a grip on the rope again and pulled myself back up, surfacing without a decompression stop, and slithering into the safety of the rubber duck.

Searchers found no trace of Greg, and at the memorial service, members of his family said he loved diving so much it was the way he would have chosen to go. I did not share that view but nodded pleasantly in harmony, knowing that they would feel better for a while at least. The police and the coroner looked at my photos several times—they seemed morbidly entranced by them—and concluded that his death was ‘misadventure’. I did agree with that view!

It was a moral judgment and out of respect for Greg that I never entered any of the photos in the Club’s Underwater Section.

However, I did enter one in a National Geographic competition. It showed the big orca carrying Greg away, bathed in surrealistic sunlight, observed by its three companions, their eyes all pivoted backwards, watching the instant of the catch, one with the stingray still firmly clamped in its jaws.

I won $10,000 in cash and a thirty-day diving tour of the Caribbean.

OLD BLUE

Dog lying on its side

As the four-wheel-drive towing the eight-metre fibreglass boat skidded to a halt outside the pub, the plume of dust whirled around the old man and the dog—just as the old Māori painfully hoisted himself up onto the single step of the pub’s porch.

‘Well, there’s your one man and a dog,’ said the driver with a laugh. ‘You said this place looked like it had a population of one man and a dog.’

‘Not sure you could count either of them,’ the other replied. ‘To count them, they have to be alive, don’t they?’

The old grey-haired dog, favouring his front left leg as well as the diagonally opposite rear right leg, coughed weakly from the ingested dust as he shuffled in the pub door after his master.

‘You’d be chuffed with the fish, though. I told you the Coromandel’s not fished out like the Hauraki Gulf,’ said the driver, leaping out of the vehicle and brushing his trackies clean. He was the taller of the two with swept-back fair hair firmly held in place with hair gel.

‘You’re right about that … I’ve never seen so many snapper, and the big one is a beauty!’ His mate was short, with an evenly tanned complexion from regular visits to a suntan clinic. He wore expensive sunnies, had a number two haircut and stubble to match. They both wore two-toned sneakers and sweatshirts with identical designer logos on one breast.

‘Well, let’s get rid of the salt with a quick beer and get on the road.’

‘What is the time?’ said the short one, then looking at his watch, added, ‘11.45, good timing! We can still get back to Auckland for dinner and drinks with the girls tonight.’

They went into the pub, where the old Māori was leaning on the scarred wooden bar with a handle of Waikato. They could see the dog sprawled out at the far end of the long, almost empty, public bar, beside a sizeable dust-covered window, already loudly snoring in the only patch of sunlight in the bar.

‘What would you like, boys?’ asked the owner of the establishment.

‘Couple of cold lagers. Do you have Heineken?’

‘Nah, Lion or Waikato.’

‘Couple of Lion will have to do.’

‘How’d ya fishing go?’ asked the publican as he got their stubbies.

‘Great! Got a bin of snapper, one massive one, out by the pinnacles.’

‘No big fish left out there now,’ said the old Māori. ‘Used to catch big ones with a hand line—just out here in front of the pub. Even out by the pinnacles, there’s no big fish left anymore.’ He sipped on his handle of draft as the two young men glared at him.

‘Do you want me to bring the bloody bin in to prove it,’ asked the driver.

‘Good idea,’ said the publican. ‘Prove your point, wouldn’t it?’

The driver, visibly angry, left the bar to get the fish, and the short dark young man asked sarcastically, ‘So you used to catch big ones yourself. Was that before or after the Second World War?’

‘Both,’ said the old man calmly, ignoring the rudeness.

‘And was your old dog there too, as a witness?’

‘Not then, only after the war. Saved my life once—old Blue—we were pig hunting—Blue came outa the bush on his own—fetched my cuz after a big tusker gored me leg.’

‘Doesn’t look much like a pig dog now, ‘bout time he was put down by the look of him,’ said the Aucklander.

‘Blue’s time is not up yet; he’s still smarter than any man I’ve ever met,’ said the old man affectionately.

The other Aucklander struggled in with his fish bin and dumped it on the floor beside the old man, who leaned over and looked at the fish with disgust.

‘Would’ve kept that one,’ he said, ‘it’s hardly big though—but the rest are just tiddlers.’

‘They’re all legal,’ claimed the driver. ‘We measured them.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ said the old Māori. ‘But I would’ve still chucked them back. You Pakeha are why there are no big ones anymore.’

The two young men sipped their beer and glared at the old fellow who had nearly finished his handle of beer.

‘He claimed his dog is smarter than either of you two,’ said the publican, deliberately personalising the old man’s earlier comment.

The old man looked down but remained silent.

‘If you can prove that dog is smarter than me, you can have the big fish,’ said the tall, fair yuppie, picking it up and slapping it on the bar in front of the old man.

The old man looked at them both and slowly nodded as if there was no doubt whatsoever about the point he had made—it was just a matter of how to prove it. In the silence that followed, the dog coughed, shuddered as if it was experiencing an old nightmare, and the snoring became even louder than before. The two young men smiled at each other and drained the last of their beers.

‘Maybe I can prove it,’ said the old man.

‘Oh Yeah!’ said the Aucklanders in unison.

‘I reckon I can prove that Blue can read my mind, and you Pakeha couldn’t do that, could you?’

The Aucklanders snorted their disbelief.

‘Without saying a word, I will ask Blue to signal midday to us in some way. If he doesn’t deliver, I’ll get you both another beer.’

The barman immediately slapped two more stubbies beside the big fish.

‘No whistling, finger-snapping, foot-tapping, or any other secret signals?’ asked the tall one. ‘No tricks?’

‘No tricks, no nothin’, I can’t even see Blue from here,’ replied the old man.

The Aucklanders looked at each other grinning: ‘What the hell, you’re on, but it has to be inside 15 seconds, either side of noon, on my Rolex,’ said the short one.

‘And you’ll need to get on with it; you’ve only got 30 seconds to go,’ he said, looking at his watch.

The old man nodded and put one hand over his eyes in deep concentration as if he was communicating subconsciously with his dog.

The short dark Aucklander quietly counted down intervals of five seconds before the hour, ‘Twenty-five … twenty … fifteen … ten … five.’

The dog stirred in his corner, and his deep snoring seemed to stop.

The Aucklander grinned at his mate. ‘Zero, we’re halfway.’

The dog snuffled, stood up, thrust its head high up, and began howling like a wolf.

The old man drained his handle, politely thanked them for the fish, and picked it up by shoving one hand into a gill flap. The publican turned away to put the beer back in the cooler so that no one could see his beaming face. The old man walked to the door, the weight of the big fish causing him to lean the opposite way to stay on balance, and the dog followed in a similar wobbly gait. The dumbfounded Aucklanders stood at the bar, shocked to the core, unable to believe what they had witnessed, as their big fish disappeared out the door.

When the old man got across the road and inside the gate to his old whare, he leant over and patted his dog, ‘I keep tellin’ ya Blue, ya shouldn’t worry about the mill’s lunchtime siren.’ The dog wagged its tail, its whole body shaking in harmony; the old man shook his head in wonder at how a dog could hear something so far away, well beyond any man’s hearing.

DOLL FINN

Swinging doors with Bikini hanging on them

As far as I can remember, the skipper was the first who referred to Judith Finn as Doll Finn. He said it was natural enough to call a diver ‘Dolphin’ and, besides, she reminded him of Dolly Parton. She was undoubtedly a match in build for the busty singer, but that’s where the resemblance ended. She did not have the smile or charm, let alone the voice, of Dolly Parton. When Doll opened her mouth, she was unmistakably Australian with a harsh nasal twang, an aggressive nature, and a vocabulary